Featured vs SourceBottle in 2026: AI PR co-pilot vs human-driven Australian call-out platform
Featured matches you to opportunities with an AI chat interface and bundles in GEO visibility tracking. SourceBottle pairs a free Australian Expert Directory with a real person pitching your profile to journalists.
Featured
SourceBottle- Featured is a global, AI-matched opportunity feed. SourceBottle's call-out network and media relationships are predominantly Australian, which matters a great deal if you are targeting US or UK press.
- SourceBottle's pitching is done by a real team member reviewing call-outs and submitting your Expert Profile; Featured's matching runs entirely through its AI chat interface.
- Featured includes GEO Visibility tracking, for how a brand shows up in AI-generated search answers, on every plan. SourceBottle has no AI search visibility feature.
- SourceBottle's free plan gives you a permanent, publicly searchable Expert Directory listing that journalists can find without you responding to a call-out. Featured has no equivalent public directory.
- SourceBottle's No Pitch No Pay plan charges $25 only when its team actually pitches you, capped at 3 pitches a month, a genuinely different pricing model from Featured's flat monthly credits.
- Neither tool offers a public API, and neither has meaningful CRM or analytics integrations as of mid-2026.
Featured and SourceBottle both grew out of the same HARO-era idea, connect journalists who need sources to experts who want coverage, but they built in opposite directions. Featured leaned into software: an AI chat interface that matches you to journalist requests, podcasts, speaking events, and AI search visibility across a global opportunity feed, priced from free to $79 a month. SourceBottle leaned into people: a free Australian Expert Directory backed by a human pitching team that will manually match your profile to journalist call-outs for $25 a pitch or a flat monthly fee. One scales through automation and covers any market; the other trades scale for a genuinely Australian media network and a person doing the matching instead of an algorithm.
The tools at a glance
Featured
AI-powered PR co-pilot for journalist requests, podcast pitching, and media opportunity discovery
Featured is an AI-powered PR co-pilot that aggregates journalist requests, podcast opportunities, bylined article slots, and speaking events into a single chat interface. The original Featured.com was a Q&A marketplace that has since migrated to a separate platform, Connectively; the current product is a broader assistant built for the full range of earned-media opportunity types, plus GEO Visibility tracking for how your brand appears in AI-generated search responses.
Featured Chat is the interface: you prompt it conversationally and it pulls from a live database rather than generating generic advice, and Automated Workflows keep monitoring running in the background so you get alerted by email, Slack, SMS, or in-app notification instead of checking manually. Pricing is transparent across three tiers, Free, Lite at $29/mo, and Pro at $79/mo, with all tiers sharing the same feature set and only the daily AI usage allowance scaling up.
What Featured does not have is a human reviewing your fit for each opportunity, matching is entirely AI-driven, and there is no journalist database for proactive outbound pitching or public directory listing that lets journalists discover you passively. There is also no API for exporting opportunity data into other tools.
| Feature | Free $0/mo | Lite $29/mo (annual) | Pro $79/mo (annual) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Featured Chat (AI opportunity matching) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Journalist request matching | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Podcast & speaking discovery | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GEO visibility tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automated workflows | Limited | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-channel alerts (Slack, SMS) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Daily AI usage | Low | 5x Free | 5x Lite |
SourceBottle
Free journalist-to-source matching platform with optional human-driven pitching service
SourceBottle is an Australian publicity platform founded in 2009 by Bec, built to give experts free access to media leads regardless of PR budget. The base model mirrors HARO: journalists post call-outs when they need sources, and the call-outs get emailed to subscribers whose keywords match. Anyone can create a free Expert Profile, which also gives you a permanent, searchable listing in the Expert Directory so journalists can find you without a call-out ever going out.
What sets SourceBottle apart is its human-driven pitching service. On the No Pitch No Pay ($25/pitch), Unlimited Pitches ($65/mo), and Agency ($130/mo) plans, a real member of the SourceBottle team manually reviews incoming call-outs and proactively submits your Expert Profile to the ones that fit, rather than leaving matching entirely to keywords and your own attention. The Agency plan supports up to 5 Expert Profiles with unlimited pitching and unlimited keywords, priced for PR professionals managing multiple clients.
The trade-off is geography and polish. The bulk of SourceBottle's call-out volume and media relationships are Australian, so US or UK targeting will see meaningfully less relevant activity. There is also no analytics dashboard, no journalist contact database for outbound pitching, no API, and the interface itself is ASP-based and dated compared to a modern SaaS product.
| Feature | Free $0 | No Pitch No Pay $25/pitch | Unlimited Pitches $65/mo | Agency $130/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expert Profile & Directory listing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Call-out alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Human-driven pitching | No | Up to 3/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Expert profiles supported | 1 | 1 | 1 | Up to 5 |
| Priority directory listing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Yearly plan available | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Featured | SourceBottle |
|---|---|---|
| Business model | Self-serve AI chat platform | Free directory plus optional paid human pitching |
| Free tier | Yes (Free plan, capped daily usage) | Yes (Expert Profile and alerts are free) |
| Geographic focus | Global | Primarily Australian |
| Journalist call-out alerts | Yes (AI-matched via Featured Chat) | Yes (via email) |
| Human-reviewed / matched pitching | No (AI matching only, no human pitch team) | Yes (No Pitch No Pay, Unlimited Pitches, and Agency plans) |
| AI-generated search (GEO) visibility tracking | Yes (included on every plan) | No |
| Podcast & event opportunity discovery | Yes | No |
| Passive public expert directory | No (opportunity feed, not a searchable public directory) | Yes (searchable Expert Directory) |
| Agency multi-profile plan | No (per-seat pricing only) | Yes (Agency plan, up to 5 profiles for $130/mo) |
| API access | No | No |
| Starting price | $0/mo | $0 (Free) / $25 per pitch |
Considering AI Peekaboo alongside Featured and SourceBottle?
Featured's GEO Visibility tracking is included on every plan but has no API and no white-label delivery, so agencies cannot pipe the data anywhere or resell it. SourceBottle has no AI search visibility feature at all, its entire value is Australian media call-outs and human pitching. AI Peekaboo tracks AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other engines with a read and write API from $50 per month plus white-label reports, the layer neither of these PR-focused tools offers for teams that specifically need AI answer-engine visibility.
Read the AI Peekaboo review →Which should you choose?
FeaturedSourceBottleFeaturedSourceBottleSourceBottleFeaturedThe honest split here is geography plus how much you trust an algorithm versus a person. If your media targets are Australian, SourceBottle's free directory and human pitching team have real relationships that Featured's global AI feed cannot replicate locally. If your targets are US, UK, or international, SourceBottle's call-out volume thins out fast and Featured's broader opportunity feed plus GEO tracking is the more useful tool. Neither replaces a journalist database for cold outbound pitching, so treat both as inbound-opportunity tools rather than full PR platforms.
Bottom line
If you are pitching Australian media, start with SourceBottle's free Expert Profile and consider the $25-per-pitch plan once you want a human matching you to call-outs. For everyone else, Featured's free tier covers more opportunity types with AI matching and adds GEO visibility tracking that SourceBottle simply does not have, and $29/mo for Lite is worth it once you are actively running outreach rather than checking in occasionally.
Frequently asked questions
Is SourceBottle only useful if I am based in Australia?
SourceBottle works best for Australian media targeting, since the bulk of its call-out volume and journalist relationships are Australian, though the platform accepts global experts and journalists. If your primary targets are US or UK publications, expect meaningfully lower relevant call-out volume than a global feed like Featured.
What does SourceBottle's human pitching service actually do differently from Featured's AI matching?
SourceBottle's paid plans have a real team member manually review journalist call-outs and submit your Expert Profile to the ones that fit, catching context a keyword match might miss. Featured's matching runs entirely through its AI chat interface with no human review step, which is faster and cheaper but relies on how well you prompt it.
Does either tool track AI search or GEO visibility?
Only Featured does. Its GEO Visibility feature tracks how your brand and expertise appear in AI-generated search responses across platforms, included on every pricing tier. SourceBottle has no equivalent capability; it is focused entirely on traditional journalist call-outs.
Is SourceBottle's free plan actually useful or just a taste of the paid product?
SourceBottle's free plan is genuinely useful on its own: you get a permanent Expert Profile in the searchable directory and receive all call-out alerts, and you can respond to any call-out yourself at no cost. The paid tiers only add the human pitching layer on top, they do not gate the base directory or alerts.
Can a small PR agency use either tool for multiple clients?
Yes, both support it differently. SourceBottle's Agency plan at $130/mo covers up to 5 Expert Profiles with unlimited pitching, built specifically for agencies. Featured does not have an agency-specific tier; you would run separate Automated Workflows per client on a standard plan instead.
Which tool is cheaper for someone who only expects a couple of media opportunities a year?
SourceBottle's No Pitch No Pay plan at $25 per pitch is built exactly for this case, you pay nothing in months with no matching activity. Featured's cheapest paid tier is a flat $29 a month regardless of how many opportunities you actually use, though its Free tier also costs nothing if low usage is acceptable.